10 Reasons Your New Year’s Resolutions Will Fail Again, Try This Instead.

January has come, and almost gone. It’s a festive tradition to make new year’s resolutions. Most of them sound like this:

1. Save money.
2. Lose weight.
3. Learn a new skill.
4. Travel more.
5. Spend time with family and friends.

Blah blah blah.

You get the idea. Most of these resolutions never come to pass, at least for the rest of the year. They remain a wish-list at best. Here are some ideas to write down proper goals for the year, and what you can do to achieve them.

1. Planning

In most cases, new year’s resolutions are made during happier times, over lunch with family, chilling with friends at a park, or when the stars at night claim their presence after the bright lights from fireworks have died down. The problem is that these are made at the spare of the moment without much thought put into them, let alone any planning done to ensure they see the light of day.

Take some time out, preferably a day, shun off all technology, you can do this on paper. Reflect on your life and be clear on what you want to achieve. Elon Musk is known for his extreme work schedule, amongst other things, and he plans his days right to the last minute. He breaks every hour down into 5 minute blocks and can account for that time.

Most of us spend precious time trying to get in the mood to finally do something, but planning can save us from decision fatigue. This does not suggest taking the extreme route but you need to know where your time goes in order to avoid unforeseen circumstances, or at least work around them.

2. Data

Planning will make more sense when you work with data.

Firstly, you need to identify your data points. Almost everything in your life can be measured, but you need to know what to measure. You want to save money? You need to ask yourself a few questions like — why are you spending recklessly in the first place. Is it retail therapy? What could be troubling you? Are you always chasing sales, and why? The deeper you dig the more you realize that the problem could be something else instead of the one you are trying to solve.

Secondly, data will help in the decision making process. You will avoid wishful thinking, which often makes up most of our new year’s resolutions.

3. Overestimating

“Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.” — Bill Gates

The biggest problem with new year’s resolutions is that they are usually limited to a year. And in that one year we want to lose weight and be rich. When we overestimate what we are capable of we find ourselves overwhelmed and end up doing nothing.

Plan. Collect data, and plan within your capabilities.

4. New Skills

How many times have you heard, or seen, people say the famous line — “New Year, New Me.” As much as this is uttered with good intentions, it means nothing if you remain the same people you were the year before.

If you want to lose you might need to learn fasting or cooking healthy meals, otherwise it will be new year new you each year without much changes. If you want to save money, you might have to learn budgetting or cost cutting measures.

What got you here won’t get you there. You will have to acquire new skills that align with your goals.

5. Preparation

After all the planning, you need to factor in disruptions in your plans. They will happen. None of us foresaw Covid-19 and its devastating effects on everything.

Sometimes we fail to achive our goals because our plans are cast in stone. They need to be flexible, otherwise we will be discouraged to carry on when disaster strikes.

Plan for the worst case scenario. This may sound sad and gloomy, but you will be better off if you plan for it and it doesn’t happen rather than drown in optimism and get punched in the life. Life happens.

6. Calendar

Tomorrow, soon, and one day do not exist on a calendar. This can be a powerful tool when used correctly. The rich and successful swear by it. Calendars have been around for thousands of years, and people back then had already discovered patterns of time and seasons.

They knew when to plant, when to harvest, when to hunt, and other tasks necessary for their survival. They continue to play a crucial role in our lives today.

7. Research

Research is crucial for any goal. It eleminates the need to do guesswork and expands your knowledge base pertaining to the subject of interest. When you do your research you get to have the latest information and guides you for better discernment. It also gives you new ideas and different ways of tackling the goal.

Trying to lose weight? Maybe intermittent fasting could help instead of spending a fortune on pills and dieticians, but you can only know that when you do your research.

8. Trimming The Fat

I have mentioned losing weight a few times, it is the most popular new year’s resolution. This idiom, though, has been around for a while and refers to cutting off unnecessary parts to get to the meat.

You need to take care of important things first that relate to your goal, or helps in achieving it. It also includes cutting off bad habits which not only prevents you from achieving a specific goal but also spills onto other parts of your life.

Keep the main thing the main thing. You can do this by:

• Auditing your time.
• Do it daily, no procrastinating.
• Create a not-to-do list.

9. Keeping Your Plans A Secret

You need people to hold you accountable all the way through. This is one of the reasons we have mentors. It is tempting to keep your plans a secret, mostly because you can fail comfortably without anyone breathing down your neck.

You don’t have to tell the whole world or put them on a billboard but find people you trust that you can also account to, they will add the necessary pressure for you to perform.

10. Theme

This should have been the first on my list. Just like companies have mission statements, you need to have a theme for each year. This will guide your decisions and calibrate your actions.

A theme will help you decide what to work on. Big events around the world always have a theme and there are reasons for that. One of them is that a theme helps with distinction, no two years are the same. Another reason is anticipation.

A story is not complete without a theme, and at the beginning of each year we hope to write a story that is better than the one before.

Make a theme and stick to it.

Thanks for reading. You can follow me on twitter — @iamtmaloka